


Two Halves of the Same Whole

by The_Necessity_of_Darkness



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Childhood, Colorblindness, M/M, Passage of time, Soulmate AU, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, alternating pov
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-10 02:43:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19898557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Necessity_of_Darkness/pseuds/The_Necessity_of_Darkness
Summary: Probability was against him with this whole soulmate business. Finding one person in seven billion was almost like some sick joke.Follows Sherlock and John from adolescence to adulthood, and the separate trials and tribulations they must overcome to meet.





	Two Halves of the Same Whole

**Author's Note:**

> This is basically an overhaul of my past work by the same name. It had been left unattended and unfinished for a while because I couldn’t seem to write in the same style. I feel my writing has improved and the only way to do the story justice was to completely rewrite it. I’ve also rewritten certain key plot points from season four into the story.

Sherlock lay on the bed like a dead thing. Sunlight poked through the sliver of the drawn curtains, illuminating the crown of his head. He observed it with absent amusement, extending his hand, flexing his fingers, watching the white light as it danced across his skin.

It was most likely early afternoon, or somewhere thereabouts, and he was quickly growing impatient with the complete lack of stimuli. The light acted merely as a safe little distraction, something fascinating to watch but clearly simple in nature when thought about more than just fleetingly.

A faint noise disrupted his idle observation. Unmistakable, he thought, so clearly unmistakable. It was a soft noise, akin to wind chimes catching a gentle breeze in the autumnal sky. It was so gentle that he could have pretended it was a simple conjuration of his imagination. He could’ve forgotten the moment, tucked it into a corner of one of the lesser used rooms in his Mind Palace, completely wiped it from memory. He could’ve lived life without the knowledge that the brief moment ever passed—after all, no one else had heard or would ever hear the sound as he had.

But Sherlock’s nature was not to shy away from knowledge. Even at the age of eight, knowledge was his weapon of choice. It was a second skin against bullies; the shield he brandished in self defense; the javelin he hurled; the missing puzzle piece to every predicament. Knowledge was power, as his young brain had come to learn. To deny the noise would be to succumb to an irreparable and unforgivable lapse of ignorance. No, he thought, ignorance was unforgivable, but a good dose of suspense was acceptable.

His gaze patently avoided the underside of his wrist. Every time his eyes seemed to edge down on their own accord, he drew them upwards like one would control window blinds. Perhaps it was because he feared what he might see. He wondered whether the writing would be delicate cursive or sloppy script or a spidery expanse of letters, and ultimately if any of that would matter—whether it was simple furnishing or evidence of something he’d yet to know.

He staggered from the bed, wrenching open the curtains. The window was caked and blurred with an amalgamation of humid summer air and rain water. The road was flooded already, but the rain didn't seem like it was going to let up any time soon.

He turned inwards, facing his room once again. He stared at his figure in the mirror. Nothing jumped at him particularly, except perhaps for one errant curl at the top of his head. His eyes shifted to the pile of notebooks and novels stacked on the vanity, Post-It notes slipped between pages. His bed was unmade, the duvet contorted in ways only fabric could be.

All of it was gray. It was no surprise at all but somehow still managed to be a great disappointment.

Expectation led to heartbreak, he thought, and settled back down on his bed.

—————

No matter how he tried to handle the Saint Bernard that was his curiosity from wandering around his Mind Palace, he couldn’t seem to shake his own interest. The big dog lumbered from room to room, upturning furniture and kicking up debris in its wake. It always called Sherlock’s attention and he came bounding into whichever room to see the canine. The dog cocked its big head at him as if to indicate simultaneously its displeasure at being ignored and its bemusement with Sherlock’s seeming dilly-dallying. What are you waiting for, it seemed to say, and Sherlock had no answer.

Eventually, after having grown tired of trying to tease apart his intrigue from his conscious, he instead honed in with surgeon-like precision on his deepest thoughts. Memories of his mother resurfaced—moments long passed, from when he must have been only a toddler. His mother had told him stories of soulmates. It was all probably highly romanticized accounts, seeing as his mother, at least upon gaining colored vision, only seemed to look at the world through rose-tinted glasses. She talked of immediate connections between soulmates; soul-sucking intimacy; and most especially that vaguely familiar but also strangely unsettling sensation one has upon seeing someone one’s surely met before, but can’t seem to recall from where.

Films came to mind as well. They played like reruns in front of his eyes, all the film frames spread before him. Hushed “I love you”s when lovers embraced and love-addled confessions. He remembered quiet intimacy, but most importantly that initial glance between two soulmates where everything just seemed to click. The one would look into their beloved’s eyes, searching for something they alone could find. Something like calm would settle over their expression, as if gazing into the eyes of their soulmate was the hidden key to solving the plights of the observable universe.

In actuality, soulmates were less gravity-altering. Gazing upon one’s other half was more or less like experiencing a shock of electricity. A current would surge through one’s limbs and inundate one’s core. It would fill one with warmth like only a drawn bath could. It was like the inherent attraction between two magnets. Of course, soulmates could exist without the other; they were less like two halves and more like a pair of socks, Sherlock thought. One sock could function perfectly fine when paired with any other sock, but of course one always strived for a match. It was just better that way, but not a prerequisite for success or happiness.

And if his soulmate were to bear a frustratingly common name, like James, who's to say he couldn’t match just fine with someone else’s James rather than his own? He could get on with any James he wanted. Maybe he’d never see color, and if he didn’t, he would know it wasn’t _his_ James, but maybe color was overrated. There were people who lived quite happily without it, he assured himself, yes, quite happily, really.

Though something about the idea of an “other half” was, sillily enough, rather alluring. The prospect that there was someone who existed, designed as Sherlock’s perfect counterpart, mirroring him perfectly, complimenting him, accentuating his good and softening his bad, sticking around through thick and thin, was so childishly comforting. To be loved unconditionally and without reserve, and to do so in return without judgment.

He knew the love of family, if not that of friends—or just the one, Victor—but nothing could ever seem to successfully fill up the lonely chasm inside him, borne from expectations of the special kind of love only a soulmate could provide.

—————

It was as if the writing on his wrist was a physically painful manifestation. Something seemed to snarl beneath the soft flesh under his wrist, just below the skin’s surface. He scratched fitfully at the writing as if it caused him physical discomfort. On occasion, when the itch became almost as unbearable as that of a mosquito bite, he couldn’t help but discreetly yet forcefully pricking his wrist with a pencil.

In an attempt to quiet his own damningly persistent desire, Sherlock tried to refuse even thinking about anything so much as to do with soulmates. Mycroft and his parents all knew him to be petulant and stubborn as a mule; if anyone could accomplish such an insurmountable task, it would be a ruddy-faced and unruly Sherlock with his arms akimbo and the concentration of a flamethrower. That was what he told himself.

He lasted less than two hours. Before long, his curiosity had taken hold of his legs, carrying him to his father’s tiny library downstairs. Fueled by childish wonder and an almost desperate sense of longing for something which he had no name, he unearthed every book he could find about soulmates. He researched how the death of one’s soulmate would wipe away the scrawl on their wrist and leech the color from their life, in a literal sense. How most soulmates fell into severe depression upon their counterpart’s death.

With this fresh predicament suddenly brought to his attention, Sherlock found himself hoping that wherever his soulmate may be, whether they met or not, that he was safe and healthy. He even hoped, if only slightly, that his soulmate was thinking of him too.

—————

Mum and Dad had no idea, Sherlock thought as he twirled his spaghetti. Of course, neither did he—not gender, nor name, nor location, nor personality, nor _anything_ of his soulmate’s. If only he could deduce someone without knowing them, or do something equally as brilliant.

—————

One day, much like when the dreaded and revered name came to him, Sherlock lay on his bed. A tree branch tapped erratically against the windowpane; the floorboards creaked from downstairs; a dog howled outside; all the calamity just seemed to so quaintly coalesce that everything became unbearable and Sherlock wrenched up his sleeve. Before he could look, he ran reverent fingers over the patch of skin, his bout of courage flagging at the actual reality of seeing the name that may or may not haunt him for the rest of his lifetime.

It was like ripping off a Band-Aid, Sherlock thought, and quickly removed his hand. His eyes honed in on the dark gray script. The name which had been tormenting and intriguing him day-in and day-out for however long was only comprised of four letters.

 _John_.

He couldn’t help the unfair swell of disappointment in his chest. The name was common, but Sherlock could only hope it wasn’t a reflection of his partner’s overall character. After all, soulmates were supposedly perfect for one another. Someone dull would not do for someone like Sherlock.

—————

The revelation of his soulmate’s name rotted and festered in his head. Too many questions remained unanswered, even after countless hours of pursuing his father’s collection of books. He suddenly and unbiddenly longed for someone’s company, and quite begrudgingly Mycroft came to mind.

Sherlock set off down the hallway with his hand trailing along the banister, ready to pound on his brother’s door before realizing that Mycroft was no longer home. Memories of their long talks of soulmates slipped under his skin like broken shards of glass, and, shaking himself as if he could dislodge the shards, he set off instead towards the garden.

He traipsed through waist-high bundles of tulips, roses, and sunflowers before he saw his mother nestled by a cushion of marigolds. She had her trowel in hand and was kneeling amongst the plants.

“Mother?” Sherlock said.

“Yes, dear?” she hummed as he bristled beside her, an unwilling participant in her name-calling game.

“What did Mycroft’s soul-marking say?”

“Gregory, as I remember.” She paused, caressing the petals of a marigold. “It was the _loveliest_ shade of forest green,” she said offhandedly, with a certain amount of wistfulness choking her voice.

Her words soothed the faint but still present fear that his parents were homophobic. Something in Sherlock, which had been stubbornly clinging to his shoulders, fell away. He settled beside his mother as she tipped the water pitched generously onto the freshly planted marigold flowers.

“Why?” his mother said slowly, a knowing smile creeping onto her face. “Did you get your soul-marking, young man?” She said it sternly, with a certain air of gravitas that hadn’t been there only a moment ago.

Any intentions of lying seemed to melt away at her open and awed expression, mingled with her deadly serious mein. “Yes,” he said, proffering his right wrist as if in indication.

“Oh,” she said happily, taking his wrist in her fingers. She pulled his arm closer to her, positioning it in the direct sunlight. She ran a reverent hand over the scrawl, face a mixture of amusement and something decidedly softer around the edges. “No grandchildren from either of you boys then? That’s fine of course.” Her smile was like sunlight. “It’s all fine.”

Sherlock couldn’t help the new surge of curiosity that ballooned in his gut as he blurted, “What color is it?”

“Blue,” she said gently, like a prayer. “Such a pretty color, that. This shade is particularly breathtaking. I’ve never seen something blue that I didn’t like—the ocean, the sky—your eyes.”

When he was younger, he had been obsessed with his own self-image. The fact that he could never color coordinate outfits, nor even begin to identify the colors of his own features, always niggled at the back of his mind like an annoying itch unable to be scratched. He remembered on one occasion having his mother detail the raven of his hair, the alabaster of his skin, and the striking blue of his eyes. Her words and fascination hung on the indecision of his eyes, how they seemed to leap from blue to green to gray depending on the lighting.

“You scarf even,” she intoned, preoccupied with tending to the flowers. Sherlock ran a finger over the fabric, which to him looked about as dull as it always had. This whole color-business was frustrating, as it were. It was tedious and exasperating to know that every object had so much potential to be and look _better_ , but that a catalyst was needed to decrease the activation energy of such an event. Literally, everything around him was already in color, just unobservable by his own eyes. He was so close yet so far. There was nothing about the whole ordeal that didn’t unleash primal fury inside his chest.

Sherlock had spent an innumerable amount of time studying the science of color. He had read about the visible light spectrum, which consisted very broadly of what was known quite quaintly as “the colors of the rainbow”. He had read how the visible light spectrum was simply born from electromagnetic waves, of which cones in the eye were particularly sensitive to and therefore able to delineate. He had even memorized the proposed wavelengths of each color, categorized them from shortest to longest. He had studied photons and frequencies and anything he could get his hands on to help quantify and qualify the reality of soulmates.

Only being able to see color after meeting a particular person was more like a fairy tale than anything else. It seemed to defy all conceivable logic. How could the cones of the eye simply not work until in the presence of someone else? How did one’s body manage to intrinsically detect one’s “other half”, as if one’s counterpart had actually once been grafted to one like an extension of the body?

“There’s so many ways I could describe it to you,” his mother said, leaning her trowel against a flowerpot. “I could say how blue is crisp or calming or cool, and that would probably mean nothing to you. I know you’d particularly loathe anything other than a scientific answer, which is not something I can give in good faith or apt knowledge, but which I know _you_ already know.”

“I wonder what the first blue thing I see will be,” Sherlock said, though he thought it as unproductive to wonder, considering it was far too impossible to attempt to predict the nature of his color surfacing.

“Whatever it is, your color will appear incrementally. It won’t come to you all at once, but rather over time. It will grow in its intensity, so as not to overwhelm you too much.” She smiled in that wistful way she often did when talking about the times before pregnancy and marriage. “I remember how I first saw the color red, and I had gotten headaches in the beginning from looking at it. It takes a while for your anatomy to adjust and take the newfound ability of colored vision into account.”

Sherlock hummed.

“Has Victor gotten his mark yet?” his mother said with faint interest after a brief pause.

Sherlock realized he didn’t know. “I’m not sure,” he said slowly. “I’ve never actually asked.”

“You could tell him about your mark? Or perhaps Eurus might be interested?” His mother returned to planting new sets of marigolds, seemingly exhausted with answering Sherlock’s inane questions. “Go on now, before it gets dark.”

Sherlock staggered to his feet and set off towards Victor’s house, which was only about a hundred feet away from his own. The prospect of speaking with Eurus made his skin prickle uncomfortably. He obviously loved his sister, but something in her eyes was too calculating and unorthodox. Coming from him, that was even more unusual and frightening.

He took a pebble from the little lake surrounding the property, one like the very same which he and Victor always skipped along the lake’s surface, and threw it at Victor’s bedroom window.

Victor’s face was visible almost immediately, and he opened the window to poke his head out.

“Would you like to go to the lake?” Sherlock suggested. The words felt foreign on his tongue, for it wasn’t often that he invited Victor on such ventures. It was usually the other, more outspoken boy who had always asked him over for cucumber sandwiches or to watch telly or play pirates outside. “I have something I’d like to talk about, if you’d please?”

“Be down in ten minutes,” Victor said, smiling as he shut the window.

As soon as Victor descended the flight of stairs from his upstairs bedroom, the two boys set off through the underbrush towards the preternatural lake which was always astoundingly tranquil, even despite frogs and fish they had found in the crags and shallows.

“What’d you want to talk about?” Victor said, taking a smooth stone between his fingers and launching it into the water.

Sherlock watched the ripple-effect as he thought how best to phrase it. After a moment of hesitation, he simply came out with it. “Have you gotten your soul-marking yet?”

“No, why do you ask?” The question seemed to be answered in the course of its formulation, because rather than wait until Sherlock responded, Victor said, “Wait, did you get yours? That’s amazing! What does it say? When did you find out?”

Sherlock would never have admitted to being pleasantly surprised at his friend’s enthusiasm. “Well, it said John. I only saw it today.”

“Oh,” Victor said. The tone of his voice seemed to exactly mirror Sherlock’s disappointment. “Oh, well that’s gonna be hard for you.”

Sherlock gave a gentle half-shrug. “William will be on his wrist, so I can’t feel too put off by it. I gave him an equally as common name.”

“True, I always forget,” Victor said absently, pitching another stone into the recesses of the lake. It skipped across the surface for a few moments before plunging and making the strange glug sound it always did.

Sherlock picked up a stone of his own and walked towards the well, which had quickly become his and Victor’s safe place. He relinquished the pebble and counted the seconds before it inevitably hit the murky water below. Victor came up behind him and handed him another stone. At the same time, they both dropped their stones and watched as Sherlock’s hit the bottom in marginally less time than Victor’s own.

Sherlock could see Eurus observing them on the outskirts of the lake. Their mother had said she had chalky blue eyes, omniscient and ethereal almost; even without their color, the hairs on Sherlock’s neck still stood on end. Her gaze wasn’t that of a curious little girl, but was more akin to the predatory gaze of a prowling cat surveying its prey. Of course, their parents would call Sherlock dramatic for having such an over embellished thought, but he couldn’t help the discomfiture Eurus’s presence always caused him.

“You seem quiet,” Victor said. “Are you alright? Aren’t you excited?”

“Of course I am,” he said matter-of-factly, scratching the back of his head. “It’s just…” He considered the question seriously. “I’m also terrified. What is the probability of finding one particular person out of seven billion? Probability and possibility are not in my favor.”

“There is something called fate, y’know,” Victor smiled, tossing another pebble into the water below. “If it’s meant to be, it’ll be.”

Sherlock supposed he had to content himself with that sobering thought. He hummed absently, to which Victor paused his ministrations and gave Sherlock a long look.

“Wanna play pirates?”

Sherlock smiled, tension bleeding from his shoulders and anxiety edging out of his chest. “Of course, Redbeard.”

“Last one into their outfit is a rotten egg!”

—————

Life continued as it always had. After discovering his soulmate’s name, nothing changed for Sherlock except for his expectations and impatience. He selfishly wished he could have had Victor’s name on his wrist, if only to have his soulmate _now_ , and to have some idea of what his soulmate was like. After thinking that, he immediately felt guilt flood into him on John’s behalf.

Sherlock knew most people, if they even met their soulmates at all, didn’t do so until well into their twenties or thirties. He fully knew that John wouldn’t have a physical presence in his life until much later.

However, John was quickly becoming the center of his thoughts, and even Sherlock couldn’t hope to stop it.


End file.
